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Everything was leveled, there were no extremes of joy or sorrow any more but only habit, routine, ancient family names and rites and customs, slow careful old people moving cautiously around furniture that had sat in the same positions for fifty years.

Anne Tyler

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Anne Tyler
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: October 25
Librarian
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
People
Joy
Routine
Leveled
Position
Extremes
Cautiously
Names
Fifty
Rites
Family
Slow
Rite
Moving
Careful
Positions
Around
Ancient
Furniture
Everything
Sorrow
Sat
Years
Habit
Customs

More quotes by Anne Tyler

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I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.
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I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.
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It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away
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Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.
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They were like people who run to meet, holding out their arms, but their aim is wrong they pass each other and keep running.
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Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details any good lie does.
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There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you've got.
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The very thing that attracts you to someone can end up putting you off.
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I consciously try to end my novels at a point where I won't have to wonder about my characters ever again.
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People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.
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I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
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He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.
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The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.
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She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.
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I write because I want more than one life I insist on a wider selection. It’s greed, plain and simple. When my characters join the circus, I’m joining the circus. Although I’m happily married, I spent a great deal of time mentally living with incompatible husbands.
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My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.
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No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.
Anne Tyler
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Bravest thing about people is how they go on loving mortal beings after finding out there's such a thing as dying.
Anne Tyler
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(About parenting:) ... all that tedium, broken up by little spurts of high drama.
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The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning
Anne Tyler